But when Knight Newspapers (one of the two groups that later merged to
form Knight-Ridder Inc.) polled 1,721 US residents one year after the
first moon landing, it found that more than 30 percent of respondents
were suspicious of NASA's trips to the moon. A July 20, 1970,
Newsweek article reporting the results of the poll cited "an
elderly Philadelphia woman who thought the moon landing had been
staged in an Arizona desert" and a Macon, Georgia, housewife who
questioned how a TV set that couldn't pull in New York stations could
possibly "receive signals from the moon." The greatest skepticism,
according to Newsweek, surfaced in a ghetto in Washington, DC, where
more than half of those interviewed doubted the authenticity of Neil
Armstrong's stroll. "It's all a deliberate effort to mask problems at
home," explained one inner-city preacher. "The people are unhappy -
and this takes their minds off their problems."

Poll or no poll, even James Oberg, a nemesis of Kaysing, conservatively
estimates that the disbelievers may number between 10 and 25 million
Americans.

Oberg works for NASA contractor Rockwell International as a space-flight
operations engineer with the space shuttle program. He writes as a second
profession, covering all aspects of space activity, with a special interest
in space folklore. Myths have a way of blossoming in the fertile soil of
scientific discovery, Oberg notes. "Every age of exploration is the same in
that respect - from the time of the Phoenicians...to Marco Polo, and
including mermaids and unipeds and all these mythological creatures that
lurk at the edge of our exploration. To me, it's extremely humanizing to
have this typically human reaction - this denial, this myth making - to our
lunar adventure. I'm not at all surprised that these stories or
interpretations exist. Actually, I'm surprised they aren't more widespread."

Nonetheless, hoax believers can be found in many parts of society, here and
abroad. According to Oberg, Cuban children are officially taught that Yankee
space technology failed miserably and that NASA was reduced to pitifully
faking every single lunar landing. Some New Agers also contest the
possibility of moon landings, as do Hare Krishnas. Non-mainstream Christians
at the Flat Earth Society - a Lancaster, California-based anti-science group
of about 3,500 members - contest the entire field of astronomy (not to
mention moon landings). They liken the towering launch pads to the Tower of
Babel.

The eccentricity of such convictions certainly intrigues Oberg. "I respect
these people's dedication to their view of the world. One reason they
fascinate me is that they're a constant reminder to me that we can't rest on
common knowledge, we can't be complacent with our traditional
interpretations of things - even though these interpretations are almost
always right. But I also find their pathology of reasoning, or
non-reasoning, compelling. We define health by the boundaries of pathology,
and I try and define rational thought by looking at cases that go over the
edge."

That's damning praise indeed. So it's no surprise that Bill Kaysing doesn't
much care for James Oberg, whom he dismisses as "a NASA agent."

Good Timing

If NASA had really wanted to fake the moon landings - we're talking purely
hypothetical here - the timing was certainly right. The advent of
television, having reached worldwide critical mass only years prior to the
moon landing, would prove instrumental to the fraud's success; in this case,
seeing really was believing. The magic of satellites, with their ability to
enable live global (and interplanetary?) communication, fascinated and awed
millions of people, much like anything atomic had caught the public's fancy
in the previous decade. Also, space research and rocket science had advanced
far enough to make a trip to the moon likely - or, at the very least,
remotely feasible. "The structural nature of technology had changed to make
the moon landing possible, but that also made it possible for people to
doubt it," says Gary Fine, a sociology professor at the University of
Georgia in Athens specializing in rumor and contemporary legend.

Perhaps more importantly, Watergate hadn't happened yet, and people still
trusted their elected officials. "A distrust of authority clearly plays into
this whole thing," argues Fred Fedler, who teaches journalism at the
University of Central Florida and has written a book on media hoaxes. "With
Vietnam and Watergate, people have become less trusting, and to some people
it doesn't matter what the government says; their immediate reaction is to
disbelieve and to sometimes embrace the opposite
view."